This delicate sense of irony was best expressed by Wesley Sturges, who was dean of the Yale Law School. Sturges understood Yale very well, perhaps because he had taken most of his degrees elsewhere, and he would greet new law students on their first day at the school with the observation, "I do not know why you have come to law school. If you want to make lots of money, you are in the wrong place. There is a law school about a hundred miles from here on the Charles River that would prepare you for that. The function of the Yale Law School is to train presidents of the United States." The point was, at the time no Yale Law School graduate had ever been president of the United States.--Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961

"THE APPRENTICE" FINALE (Trump version): So I've been into "The Apprentice" for awhile, especially as portrayed through Television Without Pity recaps (which often pick up on business-related issues that the show's editors miss). There aren't very many high-culture products that focus on leadership--much more in pop-cult genre products--this is also, as I've said, a huge part of why I like X-Men stories in general and Scott Summers/Cyclops stories in particular.

But the finale for this season was... it was completely crazy. And the Tw/oP recapper, Jacob, absolutely 100% nailed it. I have no idea if this link will be interesting to any of my readers, but for me, this was a pretty powerful story of image, leadership decisions, power, and race.

Trump's mic is still live. It picks up his voice: "Did you like that?"

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Mirror in the blogwatchI just can't stop it, Every Saturday you see me window shopping. Find no interest in the racks and shelves Just a thousand reflections of my own sweet self, self, self...

Cacciaguida: Replies to my Goblet of Fire review. Many good points. I'll note that SERD (we both know her, but she might not want blog publicity, hence the initials) reminded me that the Crouch family backstory sets up both the mother-love and the Ministry-duplicity storylines in a big way, and it might have been worth sacrificing some pageantry to get that in there... but then, the movie was already so long I wanted to throttle a swan, so maybe not. I stand by everything I said about the Snape scenes though. And I tried to focus on the music, the second time I saw the ending, and I still think it doesn't work dramatically.

In the narrative itself, Bronte warned against misreading Heathcliff. Isabella, his wife, stands in for the bad reader--a brilliant, ironic political point in itself. The bad reader is the sentimental reader of romance novels when life, love, and art demand a confrontation with the politics of power. The bad reader romanticizes the sadist and reads the rapist, the abuser, the violent man, as a romantic hero: tortured himself, despite proof that he is the torturer. Heathcliff describes this bad reader when he describes Isabella:

"She abandoned [her family and friends] under a delusion ... picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impression she cherished."

--Andrea Dworkin, "Wuthering Heights," in Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1989. Dworkin overwrites, always, but this essay is absolutely worth your time if you care about WH, as I do. Dworkin gets so much of its essence--even the parts with which I take issue (e.g. the eroticism of sameness)--and although she for the most part ignores WH's formal or perspectival innovations, she is 100% what she always is: hardcore. And WH demands a hardcore reader. WH demands a reader who can be at least as unflinchingly oneself as Andrea Dworkin was.

JUS IN BELLO: Marty Lederman on what is in the McCain Amendment and what it means: the good, the (potentially) bad, the ugly, the law. (Or start here and scroll down.)

And Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky:

...As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist's handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin -- a firm squeeze of the victim's palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin's "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don't, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?

But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it. ...

Finally, think what effect your attitude has on the rest of the world, particularly in the countries where torture is still common, such as Russia, and where its citizens are still trying to combat it. Mr. Putin will be the first to say: "You see, even your vaunted American democracy cannot defend itself without resorting to torture. . . . "

I DON'T REALLY KNOW HOW TO DESCRIBE IT, but here is Terry Teachout's description of his recent collapse and diagnosis with congestive heart failure. He is recovering, he could use your prayers, and he manages to describe the events with characteristic grace.

Monday, December 19, 2005

"CAPOTE": Saw it on Saturday with a friend. Verdict: a strange movie, with flaws in unexpected places.

The basic thing is that it's about Truman Capote researching and writing (and promoting) In Cold Blood, his 1965 account of the murder of a small-town Kansas family; and either you think, Whoa, must see now! or, ...And? The movie doesn't work hard to shift people from category B to category A--characters talk about how revolutionary the book's style is, how it will change the way people write and how journalism gets done, but even though this actually turned out to be true you don't get a sense from the movie of why or how. If you aren't interested in this story already, I don't know that the movie would make you interested. That's okay by me, because I was already fascinated with the story. So anyway, let's say you are already interested, for whatever reason. Does the movie work?

Partly no: This might be the first movie I've ever seen with good writing, great acting, and intrusively bad direction. How does that combination occur? The music is aggressively awful, saccharine and cliched. (So are the end titles.) The cuts are jarring and purposeless, sometimes even misleading the audience to focus on the wrong thing in a scene. Grr.

There's also a major writing problem: Although we do get a strong, and fairly subtle, sense of all the elements that drew Capote to the Clutter family killings once he knew a lot about them, I didn't get a sense of what made the first impression, what made the story click with him. Eh, I'm not sure that's a problem that can be solved, now that I think about it: I don't want armchair psychoanalysis of the dead, so some level of opacity in Capote's motivations will necessarily remain. Must think more whether there was a better way to handle this question though.

But partly yes: Capote is brilliantly written--egotist, self-deceiver, genius, user. And Philip Seymour Hoffman is clearly having a great time with the role. He was terrific. Harper Lee, wonderfully played by Catherine Keener, gets the fun role of Capote-deflater. They have a lot of chemistry together. And it's an inherently fascinating story. In the end, I was really glad I saw this, even though the music and editing problems grated. You should go!

...Granted, twin-island New Zealand is only the size of Colorado with a population of 4 million, and represents a mere thimbleful of the world's agriculture. But the evidence is there, its farmers say: Since the government's momentous decision to abolish all 30 agricultural subsidies, their productivity has grown, farming's share of gross domestic product has risen as has the rural population, and family farms have survived and are thriving. ...

Nationally, going cold turkey was a group effort. The government used the state-owned Rural Bank to show commercial lenders the lead in debt restructuring, and encouraged them to go easy on mortgage defaulters. The banks, facing massive losses if farming collapsed, wrote off up to 40 percent of farmers' debts. The worst-hit families were given welfare payments.

And the farmers learned to work harder and do with less.

"We were young, so we put our heads down and just worked the farm," Ruth Rainey, now 46, recalled in an interview. "We didn't buy anything basically for years."

Pedersen, now 48, believes the government was acting "from a social conscience rather than from an economic plan," and indeed, there are indications the authorities themselves weren't sure cold turkey would save agriculture. Pedersen remembers Finance Minister Roger Douglas telling a farmers' meeting as late as 1989 that theirs was "a sunset industry. Agriculture will never again be the major contributor to this economy."

Instead, farming today is 16.6 percent of total gross domestic product, up from 14.2 percent in the late 1980s, and in the year to April 2005 it racked up exports worth $12.7 billion, more than half of all New Zealand exports.

The farmers have learned to diversify. During the subsidy era New Zealand had 72 million sheep -- 18 for every human. By last year the number was just 39 million, but more efficient methods mean the islands still produce the same amount of meat, and meanwhile freed-up land is being turned over to growing grapes for wine and other exotic crops. There are even niche markets of deer, goats, ostriches and llamas.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

YESTERDAY'S TOMORROWS: R.J. Lehmann got a hold of a 1979 issue of Omni, including readers' predictions:

Predictions Shared By More Than 50% of Omni Readers...PREDICTION: By the late 1980s, cloned human beings will become a reality. OUTCOME: They clearly didn't hit the mark, but how far off they were is tough to judge. If you count embryos as humans, then Advanced Cell Technologies claimed to have done it in 2001 and Hwang Woo-Suk definitely did it in 2004, making them off by a decade and a half. If the claim is for a truly viable, post-embryonic human, then I guess it depends on what you think of the claims made by Panagiotis Zavos and Severino Antinori, or those of the Raelians. ...

PREDICTION: Gas prices will top $1-a-gallon by 1982. OUTCOME: The one prediction readers were likely hoping wouldn't come true, and it actually arrived two years early... at least, in California, which is the only market for which I have data. The average nominal price of gasoline jumped from $0.89 in 1979 ($1.98 in today’s dollars) to $1.23 in 1980 ($2.49) before going on to hit a peak price of $1.66 ($3.08) in 1981.

Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled.--Pale Fire, hee.

But let me not pursue the tabulation of nonsense.--Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

(Eh, I'm on p. 101 of this now, and I have to say I'm not sure I know why we're here. So far it seems cute and clever, but nothing more. What am I missing? --Lolita is really great, and I need to re-read it, and Invitation to a Beheading is fascinating though I thought it petered out toward the end, but this one I just don't get.)

...A schoolmate of bin Laden's told me that during the eighth or ninth grade, around 1971 or 1972, bin Laden was invited to join the Islamic study group. In that period at Saudi high schools and universities, it was common to find Syrian and Egyptian teachers, many of whom had become involved with dissident Islamist political groups in their home countries. ...

Bin Laden's experience in the group was described for me during several interviews with a schoolmate who is now a successful professional in Saudi Arabia, and who asked not to be further identified, because, he said, he did not want to risk reprisals from bin Laden's sympathizers. The schoolmate had never given interviews about Al Thagher's after-school Islamic study group, but he decided to do so, he said, because he hoped his account might warn other Saudi parents about the potential dangers of such informal tutoring, particularly of the young and impressionable. His specific account of the group's meetings is in accord with the more general recollections of several other Saudis who knew bin Laden during his Al Thagher years.

The Syrian physical-education teacher who led the group at Al Thagher was "tall, young, in his late twenties, very fit," the schoolmate recalled. "He had a beard--not a long beard like a mullah, however. He didn't look like he was religious. ...He walked like an athlete, upright and confident. He was very popular. He was charismatic. He used humor, but it was planned humor, very reserved. He would plan some jokes to break the ice with us. ..."

As time passed, the group spent more and more time inside. After about a year, bin Laden's schoolmate said, he began to feel trapped and bored, but by then the group had developed a sense of camaraderie, with bin Laden emerging as one of its committed participants. Gradually, the teen-agers stopped memorizing the Koran and began to read and discuss hadiths, interpretive stories of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, of varied provenance, which are normally studied to help illuminate the ideas imparted by the Koran. The after-school study sessions took place in the Syrian gym teacher's room, on the second floor. The teacher would light a candle on a table in the middle of the room, and the boys, including bin Laden, would sit on the floor and listen. The stories that the Syrian told were ambiguous as to time and place, the schoolmate recalled, and they were not explicitly set in the time of the Prophet, as are traditional hadiths. "It was mesmerizing," he said, and increasingly the Syrian teacher told them "stories that were really violent. I can't remember all of them now, except for one."

It was a story "about a boy who found God--exactly like us, our age. He wanted to please God and he found that his father was standing in his way. The father was pulling the rug out from under him when he went to pray." The Syrian "told the story slowly, but he was referring to 'this brave boy' or 'this righteous boy' as he moved toward the story's climax. He explained that the father had a gun. He went through twenty minutes of the boy's preparation, step by step--the bullets, loading the gun, making a plan. Finally, the boy shot the father." As he recounted this climax, the Syrian declared, "Lord be praised--Islam was released in that home." As the schoolmate recounted it, "I watched the other boys, fourteen-year-old boys, their mouths open. By the grace of God, I said 'No' to myself. ...I had a feeling of anxiety. I began immediately to think of excuses and how I could avoid coming back."

THE PRIEST AS "OTHER": Fascinating and provocative little op-ed from a married Catholic priest (pastoral provision thing):

...The issue is not about the marriage or celibacy, or sexuality at all--not really. The issue is how does our culture make sense of Catholic priesthood when we have come to understand the diminishing role of clergy (Protestant as well as Catholic) solely in terms of functionality? ...

Now contrast this development with what was claimed of the Catholic priest in the same 16th century. Committed to the idea that what one is has priority over what one does, Roman Catholicism came to understand the priest as an icon of sorts: He was a sign of the "other." It wasn't that he was holier or wiser, or even necessarily a good person. But the priest bore a certain other-ness, often (usually?) in spite of himself. ...

First, American Catholics have succeeded in becoming mainstream. Furthermore, in so doing they have often bought into the notion of clerical functionality. ...

(I am convinced that when future social historians examine the causes of such deviant behavior, a major one will be that fragile individuals, who understood religion in terms of fetish, were allowed to assume a priestly role that simply could no longer sustain their weaknesses. It is significant that the Bible closely links the fetish of idolatry and sexual deviance.)

Where does all of this lead us? If Catholic priests are to fit in, they'd better get with the program: They'd better prove that they have a function--or at least appear to have a function. If they aren't going to marry and become middle-class, like the rest of us, they could at least mirror the sexual diversity of the larger culture.

"I WAS CURED ALL RIGHT." An excellent piece on the last lines of novels. A few quotes, but look, just make with the clicking why doncha?

...The deepest rooted of last lines is the childhood one: "And they all lived happily ever after." Unlike the first line of such stories, "Once upon a time," it isn't just a formula. It's a reassurance that the result the story has achieved will remain in place even now the story-telling has finished. But more than that, it acknowledges what the story was about all along. Folk tales that end like that have, all along, been about happiness and challenges to it; the subject of the story is there in its last line.

The line, elegantly varied, is there at the end of most classic novels. Both Emma and Pride and Prejudice not only end with almost exactly that, but take great care to have the crucial word of the novel right at the end--"uniting them" in Pride and Prejudice, "union" in Emma. ...

But there are two questions at stake here, in what Frank Kermode called "the sense of an ending". One is how far a novelist believes in the end of a story, either through perfect happiness or complete catastrophe. The other is just the sense of a cadence; the sort of thing that sounds final, even if the novel's concerns are provisional, incomplete. A novel with an unimpeachably happy ending may finish on an incomplete cadence, like Bleak House's "even supposing --". Conversely, a novel where all the questions remain unanswered at the end can, more rarely, have a resoundingly firm cadence, just like Green's Loving.

What has become rarer is a coincidence of the two. Novelists have become increasingly unlikely to bring a story to a final close with a final-sounding cadence. ...Nor is a modern novel quite imaginable that ends, quite unironically, with the peals of happiness at the end of many Victorian novels, and it's striking that modern criticism has made strong efforts to find ambiguities in the closing assertions of Great Expectations and, much less convincingly, Wuthering Heights.

You can certainly find those resounding final sentences in modern novels--none more resounding, surely, than the end of Ulysses, with its thundering repetitions of the word "Yes", like the end of a Beethoven symphony. But, philosophically, we've grown more accustomed to doubt and uncertainty. We like ambiguous endings; more than that, we like cadences that sound uncertain.

HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS. Just finished this book, by David Simon. It's the book the TV show is based on. (Haven't seen show, though.) Book came highly recommended by a bunch of people, including at least one with a law-enforcement background; and I'll recommend it too, for what that's worth. It's basically one year with Baltimore's homicide detectives, at the early edge of the late '80s - early '90s killing spree. Overwritten, but style isn't exactly the point; book rings true. It's excellent, empathetic reporting.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

ADVENT TIME IS HERE, BY GOLLY!: Okay, I have now officially shot my bolt as far as Vatican-gay-priest-stuff goes. So why not a post about fun Christmas stuff I love?

Favorite Christmas movies, in order: "It's a Wonderful Life." I expected it to be saccharine, and only watched it because of Jimmy Stewart. It's actually a hard-earned, powerful story about what it means to be good.

"The Lion in Winter." Ferocious, brilliant from start to finish, despite being bleaker than three-day-old D.C. snow.

"Gremlins." C'mon, you love it too! A genuinely poignant, creepy, low-rent fable. (The sequel, "Gremlins 2: The New Batch," was funny and flashy, but lacked the emotional commitment that made the original so awesome.)

"We Three Kings." How can you not love this unforgettable, rousing account? "King and God and Sacrifice...."

"What Child Is This?" Such a beautiful tune. I love "Greensleeves," and it's even better as a carol.

Honorable mention, because you can't not: The Pogues, "Fairytale of New York." Such a hard-ass, beautiful song. Everything I love about my country, everything I love about this very strange and tempestuous life. I note that this song was narrowly beaten out for the Christmas 1987 UK #1 spot by the Pet Shop Boys' cover of "Always on My Mind." If anyone ever asks why I miss the '80s, I won't even bother talking about Reagan or Thatcher or JPII; I'll just point out that little fact and rest my case.

A FEW STARS FROM A CONSTELLATION THAT HASN'T BEEN DRAWN YET: Scattered thoughts, in no coherent order, related to this whole Vatican-gay-priests-Andrew-Sullivan-mishegoss.

* Through philosophy I came to accept that if objects in and aspects of the physical world have meaning, they attain this meaning only through the agency of a Creator God--that if nature is a language, it can only be the language spoken by God. Philosophy didn't, though, convince me that the physical world did have this intrinsic meaning, this language. Eliot's "Preludes" helped to convince me. A strange stippling of peeling paint on a Yale bathroom wall helped to convince me. And also, a woman's face, as beautiful as the moon under water, helped to convince me. In my own life, I can't unhook the longing for beauty that drew me to the Church with the longing for the beauty I saw in other women. (And I don't especially want to unhook those things, I must admit. It seems to me that Catholic faith and chastity might be one way for me to honor those women. Look how important you were!)

* Yeah, that "Did you know priests can't be lesbians?" line, from my earlier post, was there because it's cute. But I meant it, too, in a way I wonder whether any male commenters on this whole gay-priests thing have really understood. If not being able to be a priest means the Pope thinks you're horrible, well, lesbians aren't the only women who should be upset. If you can't handle the fact that there are strong reservations (not even a thoroughgoing prohibition), based on a practical procedural document, against your receiving the sacrament of Holy Orders--well, hi there, we're half the world, we're called "women." You may have heard of us.

* What is your identity? A few of the responses to my prior post have argued that I'm not understanding that being gay is Who I Really Am, and that's what makes not boffing girls different from every other sacrifice anybody's been asked to make. Oh. See, 'cause I thought that this understanding of homosexuality is actually pretty recent, and deeply culturally conditioned and culturally dependent (doesn't mean it can be "changed"; just means that how people express and understand homosexuality changes based on their culture). And I thought there were lots and lots of cultural expressions of basic facts of human nature or individuals' natures, which might be experienced as "deep-seated," which were nonetheless prohibited by the Church: There are and have been countless cultures in which men felt that their identities as males required cruelty, to take an easy example. St. Augustine has especially acute comments on that dynamic, and on how deeply it can be embedded even in the nature of a believing Christian man.

* It might be relevant to note that restrictions on the religious practice of holy people is anything but unprecedented. Fr. Solanus Casey was not allowed to preach or hear confessions except in emergencies. St. Therese, famously, was turned down at least once by the Carmelites, and I think multiple times. Women--there we are again!--can't be priests. Doesn't mean we can't be holy.

* Struggle and suffering can coarsen a person's character. They can also gentle and strengthen it. I've learned so much about what the latter looks like from gay men and lesbians. (And I'm using those terms intentionally--I don't just mean "people with same-sex attractions," I mean people who radically disagree with me about the morality of homosexual acts.) When y'all want to talk about gay people, you might keep that in mind.

* I know I find it relatively easy to believe the Church about homosexuality, as vs. believing the culture in which I was raised, in large part because I never for a moment believed I was intrinsically good. I never believed that the fact that I really, deeply wanted something made that thing good. I found the Catholic understanding of the Fall--that we are neither good nor bad, but Fallen--astonishing and hopeful.

* I know that the alienation I experienced as a result of, among other things, my sexual orientation made it much easier for me to believe the Catholic account of human nature. If I were heterosexual, I don't know if I would be Catholic today.

* So okay, what should people actually do? What works? Friendship, immersion in the Church's beauty and its history of difficult converts, and--above all--devotion to the Eucharist. I guess you can see that as a cliche, or as the only important thing there is to say.

...Who are most likely to be in very happy first marriages? The college-educated are about twice as likely as high school dropouts; the "very" religious are also about twice as likely as those who are only slightly or not at all religious. People who marry directly without first cohabiting are also about twice as likely to succeed in marriage as those who live together.

What's the best age to get married? Earlier than most people think. Teen marriages are high-risk. But the most successful age for marriage was not the late 30s but the mid 20s. "When the quality of marriages is taken into account, however, first marriages of persons in their mid 20s emerge as distinctly more successful than those entered into either earlier or later in life," the report notes, calling this finding one that "has not been previously recognized." If you are 23 and find the right person, you are plenty old enough to make a happy marriage. ...

A separate study by University of Maryland sociologist Stephen P. Martin found that divorce rates among the college-educated have declined by half since their peak in the 1970s. He labels this growing evidence of a "divorce divide."

A RUSH AND A PUSH: So I've been a fan of Morrissey ever since my first girlfriend gave me a tape with Your Arsenal on one side and The Smiths on the other. So why did it take me until today to notice that the guy's got the same vocal hitch as Patsy Cline? You can really hear it in "That's Entertainment," which I was listening to on the excellent Suedehead compilation (which also features the beautiful, swoony Morrissey/Siouxsie duet "Interlude," my absolute favorite of solo Moz). I don't even like "That's Entertainment" too much--a bit too Savonarola for my taste--but that little vocal stutter still makes me catch my breath.

THE mother of Anthony Walker drew deeply on her Christian faith yesterday to find forgiveness for the racist killers of her son, who face up to 30 years in jail. Gee Walker, 49, had listened to every harrowing detail of the ambush by white racist thugs that left her son, a gifted black A-level student, with an ice axe embedded in his skull. ...

Within minutes Mrs Walker, a mother of six, emerged from the court arm in arm with two of her four daughters to offer words of compassion to Taylor and Barton: "Do I forgive them? At the point of death Jesus said, 'I forgive them because they do not know what they do'. I have got to forgive them. I still forgive them.

"It will be difficult but we have no choice but to live on for Anthony. Each of us will take a piece of him and will carry on his life."

The contrast between the 18-year-old victim, a devout Christian, committed student and talented basketball player who wanted to become a lawyer, and his white racist killers could not have been more stark.

Mrs Walker, matriarch to the only black family in Tarbock, Huyton, in Merseyside, spoke eloquently about how her evangelical Christian faith demanded that she forgive them. But she faltered and the tears fell as she recalled having to say goodbye to her son as he lay in intensive care with a 3ft ice axe protruding from his head.

more (via Mark Shea)--note, by the way, that this doesn't mean that the killers should go free.

THE END OF THE AFFAIR: Okay, so: There's this document, see? And it's about what you gotta be to be a priest. (For example, apparently you can't be a lesbian. Who knew?) And there are these articles that people write, because the only certainties in life are death, taxes, and journalism. And in one of these articles, somebody says that homosexuality has no "social value."

Which prompts Andrew Sullivan to post a deeply moving photograph of Fr. Mychal Judge, who (as far as I can recall) publicly said he was gay, holding a victim of the World Trade Center attacks. [*EDITED, SEE BELOW] And then this:

That's the new pope's verdict on the life and work of gay priest Mychal Judge, and the thousands of others who have served God so faithfully and so well since the beginning of the Church. Nothing this pope can do or say will ever take away from their service or their dignity as people and servants of God.

And I just... this isn't even about gay stuff, yet. (I will try to post something about gay stuff in a bit.) It's just about logic. Because Sullivan's logic would mean a lot of things I doubt he really wants to mean:

In other words: People do amazing things and terrible things. There aren't good people and bad people. So listing off someone's heroic actions does nothing to indicate that everything he did or believed was right, and it's naive and destructive to pretend otherwise.

More crucially, one of the most beautiful and hopeful doctrines of the Catholic Church is the distinction between behavior and worth. You aren't valuable because you have never screwed up, or because everything you do and believe is right. You're valuable because you were created by a God Who loves you, Who cherishes you and longs for you. If you take every chastisement based on behavior as an attack on your personal worth, you are a) a Pelagian (believing people get saved because they're so cool and special) and/or b) rejecting the possibility that God sees past your behavior, sees down to the core of you, wants you, loves you, but doesn't ever agree that everything you do is right. God is not an idolater. God's constant lament to His beloved is, "Baby, don't be that way!"

A political and (more importantly) cultural movement has sprung up to convince those of us with strong (I guess the word this season is "deep-seated"; it's the new black!) homosexual attractions that God couldn't possibly want us not to act on those attractions. Because it hurts too much to give it up? Because it seems so necessary or central to our identities? If those are the reasons people resist, I guess I just want to remind them that people every single day embrace varying kinds of sacrifice--slow or fast, honored or humiliating--and if you want anything resembling a functioning culture (let alone a Catholic one) you need people who can say that "It hurts" isn't an argument. Every functioning culture relies on a core of people who can accept that life, or God, or whatever they believe in, will ask them to do things they would never have believed possible; and they do them. Every day. Policemen and policemen's wives; soldiers and soldiers' husbands; saints and martyrs; pregnant women in desperate circumstances; everyone who suffers and whose suffering would be eased by just a little wrong action, just a small palliative sin.

You can be as big as your culture by only making the sacrifices your culture honors. You can be as big as your own self by only making the sacrifices you honor and completely understand; if you're a cosmopolitan, that will mostly mean making the sacrifices your personality and chosen subculture honor. You can be as big as the Church by making all the sacrifices God requires. I'm pretty sure most of us are in between--but we can move from one pole to the other.

Be bigger.

*EDITED: Uh, actually, Fr. Judge is the victim being held in the photograph. Moreover, there's controversy over whether or not he ever publicly claimed to be gay. I read up on this a while ago but cannot now remember the details, so I guess, just keep in mind that I am talking about Andrew Sullivan's take on Fr. Judge's life and ministry. I apologize for the sloppiness on both counts....

Angevin2: An awesome, ongoing series evaluating Shakespeare-on-film. Notable for hilarious warnings ("Depressing. Very, very depressing. Even by King Lear standards"; "Do not look directly at Malcolm's sweater. Contains genuinely terrifying Porter"), interesting interpretive notes ("I don't know that Lear is an entirely hopeless play, and I don't believe it should be presented as such"; "[P]erhaps the fact that 2H4 is a play of decline and decay means that it's easier to do in the BBC's limited format than the more energetic 1H4"), and exceptionally useful comments ("BTW, if you weren't already aware, http://www.filmshakespeare.org/ allows side-by-side comparison of editing choices of Henry V, BBC, Branagh and Olivier"--squee!!!!). Part one; part two.

Hit & Run: Wal-Mart defenses, one and (ambivalently) two. Lots of links I haven't investigated... but I bet they offer Wal-Mart defenses at prices much cheaper than those of their competitors.

Christopher Hitchens notes that Dolores Haze would be 70 this year. Not sure how old that would make Humbert Humbert--possibly interesting question is, which is the earliest war that each would remember? ...The piece itself is brilliant, by the way, and entirely worth your time. (Via About Last Night.)

Michael Young interviews Peter Galbraith:

Reason: Some say there already is a victor in Iraq, and that's Iran. Do you agree, and how far can Iran go in Iraq without provoking an Iraqi backlash? ...

Unqualified Offerings: This is a post about Middle Eastern politics and war; but also about Robert Frost, and I kind of feel like I know more about that, so that's the reason I'm linking.

And you can vote for the best libertarian or "classical liberal" (which I guess means "Enlightenment liberal," as opposed to my own position, which I will grandiosely describe as "John Paul II liberal" or "personalist liberal") blog here. Nobody cares what I think, which is why none of my guys are even on this list; but my nominations would be: Hit & Run, because I always learn from their site even when I disagree; Jane Galt, because she and her contributors think hard about stuff I don't understand (wow, ringing endorsement there!--I hope you know what I mean, though--we share underlying principles, but she knows how to apply them where I can't); the Club for Growth blog, because they're a great clearinghouse; Relapsed Catholic, because Kathy (who is also a phenomenal essayist and poet) cuts through a lot of sentimental Catholic B.S.; and The Corner, because whether you love or hate them, no libertarian-symp can afford to ignore them, and they provide a model of constructive Internet disagreement. If Unqualified Offerings posted more these days, he'd be on this list somewhere, too. (Voting link via Los Volokh.)

The contents of the [torture] room, its furnishings, are converted into weapons: the most common instance of this is the bathtub that figures prominently in the reports from numerous countries, but it is only one among many. Men and women being tortured... describe being handcuffed in a constricted position for hours, days, and in some cases months to a chair, to a cot, to a filing cabinet, to a bed; they describe being beaten with "family-sized soft drink bottles" or having a hand crushed with a chair, of having their heads "repeatedly banged on the edges of a refrigerator door." ...The room ... is converted into a weapon, ... made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed.--Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World, quoted in Achilles in Vietnam